Immeasurable: Reflections on the Soul of Ministry in the Age of Church, Inc.

by Skye Jethani

ALL PREACHERS should be grateful for time limits.

In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ.

finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.

Likewise, the allure of Church, Inc. is not merely its offer of a better, more effective approach to ministry. It’s in its promise to make us like God. Simply put, it tempts us with control.

This desire for measurable, controllable outcomes in ministry, whether rooted in the values of our culture or the rebellion of our souls, betrays the essence of our faith.

If salvation, humanity, and God Himself are enveloped in impenetrable mystery, why do we assume ministry—which stands at the intersection of all three—to be a calculable science?

I feel that in the mechanical ministry culture we occupy, we need to step back and reconsider what ministry is, what is unique about our calling, and how it remains beyond the scope of mere leadership principles and best practices.

Seminary had introduced me to remarkable women and men with godly devotion and drive, but it also showed me the shadow side of pastoral ambition. It can drive us to make great sacrifices in service to God and others, or it can be a veneer that hides far less noble motivations. What appears to be love or devotion externally may actually be fueled by profound insecurity or even, in rare cases, pathological mental illness.

Even those with a healthy motivation sometimes need our ambition engines tuned up, a realignment toward Christ and away from self-centered desires.

There is something noble about a reluctant leader, a sense that we can trust them with power because they don’t want

When paired with godliness and humility, and guided by a love for others, it can ignite life-giving change in the world.

The drive to achieve can backfire on a leader, causing terrible harm to families, congregations, and the work of God in the world.

You know the pattern. A young Christian with strong communication abilities discovers that others are drawn to him.

He genuinely wants to see others engage with God, but there is another motive lurking beneath the surface.

Comparing himself to them makes his ambition burn even hotter. Next come books, conferences, and media appearances. The inner apparatus of the church shifts subtly from growing disciples to growing the pastor’s platform. Just as he reaches the pinnacle of influence—everything implodes.

The problem was what fueled the ambition. Rather than the life-giving fire of communion with Christ, he chose the explosive power of an insecure ego.

What are the warning signs—the lights on your soul’s dashboard—that your ambition is being fueled by ungodly desires?

Lord forgive me. Researching others and studying their business strategy and how financially successful they are has turned my focus away from discipleship. Lord forgive me. This is not a money making endeavor. This is winning souls for Christ!

Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with the message that our significance is proportional to how much we change the world. Those few who actually become “world changers” are rewarded with the eternal life of Christian celebrity. The rest of us, however, are condemned to the second death of obscurity.

I believe the most frightening passage in the Bible is in Matthew 7. There Jesus says that on the Day of Judgment many will come to him saying, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophecy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” But Jesus will say to them, “I never knew you; depart from me.” These are people who are absolutely convinced that they belong to Christ because they have spent their lives on mission for Him, and they have been very effective. They have preached in His name, they have fought evil in His name, and they have performed miracles in His name. And yet, they never knew Him.

How is that possible? How can they do those amazing things and not know Christ? How can they be so effective in ministry and be rejected at the judgment? The Idol of Effectiveness has power because it causes us to look at the wrong fruit. We become enamored by relevance, power, impact, and how much we have changed the world. While all of those things are measures of effectiveness, none of them are a measure of faithfulness.

So, when we focus on effectiveness, we are focusing on the wrong fruit. We assume that if people are coming to faith, if the church is growing, if the world is changing, then we must be right with God.

God does not need you. He wants you. He did not send His Son to recruit you to change the world. He sent His Son to reconcile you to Himself. Your value to God is not in your effectiveness, but in your presence.

Hallelujah

If we are to slay the Idol of Effectiveness, we must look for the right fruit both in ourselves and in the leaders we choose to follow. That fruit is not relevance or power or global impact. The fruit of a life lived in communion with Jesus Christ is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. If we are to slay the Idol of Effectiveness then we must recapture the glorious truth that before we are called to something or somewhere, our highest calling is to Someone.

What “fruit” does your ministry measure?

Reflect on a season when your ministry was effective, but your soul was unhealthy.

If those at the center of your ministry are not experiencing the fruit of the Spirit, why would you expect those at the periphery to? Use this to begin a longer conversation about the fruit of the Spirit in your community.

We have all heard the heartbreaking stories of pastors lured into wealth’s maelstrom. We have also heard the stories of ministries that simply mismanaged their finances and slowly, quietly disappeared beneath a tide of debt. Regularly telling these tales of woe keeps church leaders vigilant. They provoke us to be effective, efficient, and practical. But might these values carry a hidden danger, perhaps even more perilous than wealth?

Rather than seeing people as inherently valuable regardless of their usefulness, we begin to wonder how we might extract more money, volunteer energy, missional output, or influence from them. Our goal as pastors shifts from serving and equipping to extracting and using. Rather than asking how we might love someone, we wonder how we might leverage them, and we can hide these ungodly motivations from others (and even from ourselves) by appealing to the universally celebrated virtue of stewardship.

As ministers of the gospel of Christ, we must stand boldly against the popular belief that everything and everyone exists to be useful. We must remember that in His grace God has created some things not to be used, but simply to behold.

True worship can never be wasteful because it seeks no return on investment. True worship is never a transaction. It is always a gift—an extravagant, “wasteful” gift.

we appreciate beautiful architecture, music, and paintings if they serve the practical goal of communicating a biblical truth or drawing people through the church’s doors. But art for art’s sake?

Artists who cultivate beauty in the world remind us that the most precious things are often the least useful. Artists provoke us to see the world differently—not simply as a bundle of resources to be used, but as a gift to be received.

perhaps the church needs to learn to be more wasteful rather than less. Maybe there is a time for the voices of practicality to remain silent as the artists prophetically call us back to extravagant worship, to behold God rather than to use Him. And maybe it is good to embrace the impracticality of having young children, the mentally handicapped, and other “useless” people in our worship gatherings as a way of valuing what the world discards, detoxifying such ungodly values from our own souls.

They are drawn to Christ, they want to follow Him as Lord, but they are finished with this aspect of Church, Inc. Whether, like Rice, they are done pledging allegiance to cultural/political Christianity, or are simply exhausted by the burdens laid on them by church leaders, there is a desire to abandon the institutional structures of Church, Inc. To a growing number of people, the church feels like a vampire sucking the life out of them.

met some deeply devoted and remarkable people, but what struck me was how few of them were deeply connected to a local church. They were committed to Christ and actively serving Him in the world, but when asked about their church, most just shrugged their shoulders. Among those who did attend a church regularly, I found that, for the most part, their church did not factor into their calling in any meaningful way.

I want to know why people who are committed to Christ are leaving the church. Why do they see Christ as giving them life but view the church as taking it from them?

When I ask more probing questions of the church dropouts I’ve met, what I discover is that most are not rejecting Christian community or the fellowship of sisters and brothers committed to Jesus Christ. Instead they are rejecting further involvement with a church institution. They aren’t rejecting the New Testament’s definition of church, but the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations commonly called “churches.”

churches outranked all other institutions as the most respected institutions in America. Today, confidence in the church has declined to 42 percent, and among younger Americans it’s even lower.3 Commitment to an institutional church simply isn’t as important to Americans anymore, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t committed to Christian community.

generation (Generation X) and Millennials (those born after 1980) have a strong aversion to institutions, and the bigger the institutions, the more distrustful we are.

But this loss of confidence in institutions is about more than corruption and failure. Revolutions in technology mean younger people are less dependent on institutions and are more personally empowered.

One poll found that 6 out of 10 college students plan to start their own business.

This is a highly entreprenueurial generation that carries a profound distrust of institutions. And these same values carry over into their faith. In their pursuit of Christ, they are not thinking about committing themselves to a single institutional church. They’re happy to get their Bible teaching from Tim Keller’s podcast. They’ll serve with that World Relief or International

In Ephesians 4, the apostle Paul gives us a vision for how the church is supposed to function. Once we grasp God’s intention for the church, we can begin to recognize how we stray and construct vampire churches instead.

Paul says Christ has given his church the gift of leaders: apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, and shepherds for an important purpose: “… to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Eph. 4:12).

all, in Paul’s day there were no church buildings or 501(c)(3) ministries, and the word ministry did not refer to the activity of a certain vocation or class of people. Instead, it referred to any act of service that brought glory to God.

How does Jesus extend His rule over all things? The answer: By giving the church leaders, filled with His power, to equip His people to serve Him and manifest His rule everywhere. Not just inside a church building. Not merely under the banner of nonprofit ministries. Not simply on Sundays. Leaders within the church are called to equip us to serve Jesus everywhere, every day, and in every aspect of our lives.

The model I was taught in seminary, and that gets extolled at most ministry conferences and in the pages of church-growth books, looks more like this: Vampire Church This is what I call a vampire church,

Rather than empowering people to manifest God’s reign in the world, vampire churches seek to use people to advance the goals of the institutional church. Success, therefore, is reached when a person is plugged into the apparatus of the church institution rather than released to serve God’s people and their neighbors out in the world, through their vocations, and in communion with Christ. This drive to use people rather than empower them is what drains the life out of them.

from God and a missional mindset. This pastor was upset that young Christians weren’t committed to the institutional agenda of his church, and his conclusion was that they must not be committed to Christ. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the problem isn’t that young people aren’t committed to the church, but that the church isn’t committed to young people? I challenged him with a different approach: rather than trying to get young people to engage your institution’s programs and goals, what if you shifted the institution to equip young people to better accomplish what God is calling them to do in the world?

There are institutional churches shifting their thinking from using people to empowering people. From growing the institution to growing disciples. From measuring how many people come to a service on Sunday to how many are manifesting the reign of Christ Monday through Saturday in every sector of their community.